Conversations with an Alzheimer's patient

Alzheimer's disease is a degenerative brain disease which has major social consequences for the individuals affected and for those who are emotionally and/or physically close to them. The role which language plays in such relationships stands at the center of this book. In contrast to traditional analyses carried out by psycholinguists, neurolinguists and speech pathologists, with speech samples elicited in clinical settings, Heidi Ehernberger Hamilton examines language in the life of one elderly female Alzheimer's patient from an interactional sociolinguistic perspective. The language of open-ended, naturally occurring conversations between the patient and the author, over four-and-one-half years, is investigated not only in an attempt to understand how the patient's communicative abilities and disabilities are related to each other and how they change over time, but, importantly, how they are influenced by both preemptive and reactive communicative behaviors on the part of the patient's healthy interlocutor. This "personal and particular" study of conversations with one Alzheimer's patient is offered as a humanistic approach to language loss. It is one in which communicative breakdowns are analyzed, not separately from details about the patient, her conversational partners, and the setting, nor from relevant social facts which may influence interactions; that is, one in which language disability is seen as a human problem within multiple linguistic and social contexts